When Writing Well Is Part of the Problem

A little more than six years ago, I had the good fortune to be in a fiction workshop with Charles D’Ambrosio at the Tin House Writers Workshop in Portland, Ore. Charlie’s three books are among my favorites, so I was very excited to be in his class. He is one of those rare creatures: a gifted writer who is also a gifted teacher. Charlie was recovering from an allergic reaction that week, and while dispensing brilliant comments, he rubbed Aveeno anti-itch cream on his wrists. The story I submitted was narrated by a 16-year-old girl who is forced to spend the summer playing bridge with her grandmother. It tentatively explored sexual drive (budding in the young narrator, waning in the old woman, who has a homoerotic friendship with her bridge partner) and longing and familial duty, and it was, Charlie said, “so well written.”

But Charlie eviscerated that story. It was too tentative, there were “too many dodges.” He gave me a piece of advice that James Salter gave him. Salter (as quoted by D’Ambrosio) said, “It is hard to get over the habit of being civilized.” As a writer, you have to push past the graceful and civilized into darker places. Good stories are about when characters stop being civilized, when there are cracks in their composure. Good fiction is born of characters’ struggle and desperation. As writers, Charlie said, we have to go looking for resistance and trouble.

That story of mine avoided trouble. The two main characters — the girl and her grandmother — were too polite to be interesting. Instead of hinting at the grandmother’s attraction to her bridge partner, I should have actually written a sex scene. A sex scene under a bridge table at a country club — a scene in which the widowed grandmother is struggling with confusion about her sexuality — would be worth reading. If the young narrator caught her 80-year-old grandmother having sex with a woman, some real drama might unfold. The grandmother, of a suburban generation that specialized in repression, might beg her granddaughter not to mention the incident to her mother. (These are my plot suggestions, not Charlie’s. He didn’t get that specific when we discussed the story.)

The good writing in that story was part of the problem. Charlie said that when writing is too fluent and too controlled, when it avoids disturbing truths, it loses its power and depth. You have to let something threaten the fluency and poise of the writing itself. The best books — the ones that grab us by the collar and won’t let us forget them — are a little out of control. (Denis Johnson’s “Jesus’ Son” comes to mind.)

Because my writing tends to be precise and controlled, Charlie’s advice was exactly what I needed to hear. And I’ll be forever grateful to him. I threw away that story about the grandmother playing bridge. (Perhaps now I’ll go back to it and find the trouble.) Now, when I’m writing, I start with characters in various degrees of desperation. I write about people whose cracks are starting to show. And I always remind myself to go darker, denser and deeper. It’s very hard to get over the habit of being civilized. But on the page, writers have to be a little wild.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…